From the Grave to the Cradle
by TraitorTatara
Summary: He was born dead. She just wanted to hear him cry.


Disclaimer: Ugh... I just typed up at least 4,212 words and now you want me to write a disclaimer too?! sheesh!... ok, I do not own FMA. I do not have a single shot at coming up with something like FMA because I have never used drugs of any kind. You don't just wake up one morning and decide to make a cartoon about Chimeras and cross-dressing Deadly Sins... that takes years of crack.

Recomended Listening AKA what I was destroying my eardrums with when I wrote this: "You Know What They do to Guys Like us in Prison" by My Chemical Romance. Or anything by them really. (Damn you Jack! Why did you make me put that in? This author's note is already too freak'n long!)

Also, reviews would be greatly appreciated as they are the only thing that keeps authors writing. :)

Note: The evil run-on sentances are now gone.

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Eighteen years ago…

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With one last heave and scream of pain, the baby came free from her body as she collapsed, panting back into the bed, doctors swarming around her like flies drawn to a corpse.

Too much like flies drawn to a corpse...

_Why isn't my baby crying? _She thought.

She expected the baby to cry, to object to being pulled from the comfort of her womb, to move, to _anything_.

She didn't expect to hear silence broken only by the doctors' muttering, "-have to be taken away…"

"…can't let her see…"

"-knew there was something wrong…"

The words hit her at the same time the smell did, the sickly odor of something that has begun to decay.

It invaded her nostrils and ripped her heart in half: half for the motionless infant that a nurse was now scrubbing the blood off of, and half full of hatred, whether for the doctors or herself she didn't know.

She just knew that, dead or not, she should be holding her baby now, not listening to doctors make plans for its removal.

"Please… let me… hold… my baby..."

The broken tone of the words and the look of utter despair in her eyes was enough to melt the hardest heart, and the small body was soon wrapped in a blanket and tentatively placed in her desperate arms.

She held it lovingly, and although the reek of rotten flesh had brought tears to the eyes of the doctors, she cradled it against her cheek as if she didn't notice the smell.

Maybe she didn't.

For all anyone knew, her mind had probably snapped, and she would have to live in an institution after this, hugging a doll that she thought was her child.

It had happened before, although ordinarily the mothers of stillborn babies either die during birth,

(God only knew how she had lived with that thing rotting inside her; it had to have been dead for at least a week by the smell)

Or lose the will to live afterward and make sure that they join their children on the other side.

But Izumi was no ordinary patient…

At least before this had happened.

Still, the stench was almost too much too bear, and a nurse made the mistake of plucking the boy out of his mother's arms.

That was when her mind truly snapped, and she screamed, a high wailing cry of pain and longing.

Several people grabbed her and held her down as she tried to run after her child, not believing that it, that _he_ was dead.

Someone tried to force several capsules down her throat.

She spit them out, grabbed the arm of one of the people holding her, and twisted sharply, breaking the bones and with it, their grip.

They howled in pain and staggered back, clutching the shattered limb close to their body.

But no-one was paying them much attention; they were instead focused on Izumi, who had grabbed the arm of the doctor who was, even now, trying to drug her into unconsciousness.

She carved a circle into his palm, and released all her anger and despair into the flesh while both the man and those around him screamed.

The charred corpse fell away, flesh still bubbling and flames slowly dying on the remains of hair and clothes.

She screamed one last time, then spat out both words and blood, hatred burning in her glare, "My baby…give me…my…baby!"

Then, exhausted by the strain, both physical and emotional, of delivering a corpse, she fainted into a natural slumber, deeper than the drug-induced coma they had been planning on putting her in.

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When she awoke she was in the bed that she shared with her husband, alone, and covered in blood.

She sat up quickly, unable to remember where the blood had come from, and panicked by the strange feeling in her belly.

She felt…

_Empty_.

As if the baby was no longer occupying her womb.

Was it?

What was she forgetting?

She looked out the window, and, although she didn't expect the view of the back yard to give her any answers, it did…

In the form of her husband digging a hole in the ground.

A_ grave_, something whispered, and the memory of the dreadful silence that had filled the hospital room came flooding back, bringing tears to her already swollen eyes.

It _was_ a grave, a grave for her failure, a monument to a life that she had created and destroyed…

A tomb for a child who never got a chance to cry.

The baby was lying a few feet away from the grave that would serve as a cradle for it.

The sight of the motionless bundle caused her to start feverishly pulling her clothes back onto her aching body, tossing the hospital gown into a corner and promising to burn it if she ever got the chance.

One part of her mind did at least, but the rest was focused on a simple fact that she couldn't comprehend: he was going to bury the baby.

He was going to bury _her_ baby.

"Never" she whispered as she fumbled with the door handle, "I'll die before I abandon…"

"My baby… "

"And then you can bury is both together."

She finally got the door to open, ran outside, and grabbed the baby, running somewhere, anywhere.

She ignored her husband's shouts as they faded into the distance.

She was never coming back.

"You would have buried my baby."

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She closed her eyes, and when she opened them she was at the remains of the stone house at the center of the island, the baby cradled in her arms.

She realized what she could-No, what she _had _to do, and set the baby down in the center of the floor.

A transmutation circle came to life around it, and she put her hands on it, trying not to think about it.

She didn't want to think about it.

She just wanted her baby.

She just wanted to hear it cry.

She fell back as lights started to glow, and a pain exploded in her chest and blocked out her vision with a blood-coloured cloth.

So this was Death…

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Then her eyes cleared, she could see the bundle moving, and hear faint cries emitting from it.

She smiled, but it quickly faded once she realized that something was wrong.

Dead wrong.

His wails didn't sound normal…

Didn't sound…

Human.

Slowly, with trembling hands, she peeled back the blanket and beheld what she had created with growing horror and despair.

His- no…

_Its_ eyes were huge and bug-like, popping grotesquely out from its skull.

At first it looked like its eyes were closed, then she realized that, instead of eyelids, a thin layer of skin was growing on the eye itself, blinding it permanently.

It had no nose, just two small holes above a gaping mouth filled with sharp, shark-like fangs.

An unnaturally long tongue, forked and blackened, slithered out and waved at her like an obscene flag.

She simply stared in horror and regret.

She had birthed a corpse…

And created a monster.

Still, it was her baby.

She picked it up and held it to her chest, trying not to feel the slimy warmth of the tongue traveling along her jaw.

Then everything vanished, leaving a blank whiteness broken only by two huge floating stone slabs carved with twisted images of dead and dying men.

They opened.

"A gateway. It's a gateway."

She muttered, not knowing or caring where it was or why it was there.

Small, malformed hands on impossibly long arms reached towards her…

No, towards the thing in her arms.

_They want the baby_.

She realized, terror rising in her chest.

The terror came up her throat and spilled into her mouth in the form of hot blood when she realized something even more frightening…

_I'm going to give it to them_.

Above the black hands, a large deep violet eye watched her greedily, like a child eyeing a piece of candy.

Many smaller eyes, likewise coloured violet, lay unblinking behind the hands, waiting for something.

_For the_ _baby_.

She lifted him up, reluctant to give him up, but aware of the price that must be paid.

She couldn't keep him.

But she couldn't let him go.

She couldn't breathe…

The hands took the wailing infant from her, then the eye took the price of the baby's life.

Her insides were on fire.

Some of them were falling into a horrible empty space in her gut where something should be.

Blood spewed from her mouth, droplets of it clinging to a few slower-moving hands.

The pain was overwhelming, and when she woke up again she was back in the hospital and the baby, the hands, and the violet eye were gone with only the agony burning in her belly as proof that they ever existed.

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He was being lifted up by a pair of strong hands, then suddenly, many pairs of smaller hands lifted him away, and a door slammed shut, extinguishing the light and letting darkness prevail.

All except the hands holding his arms dropped him, and he hung almost crucified above whatever sort of hellish ground would be in a place like this.

Then the hands stripped off the blankets, exposing the rest of his mutilated form, and, starting from his feet, tore away his skin.

Blood poured into the darkness, screams echoed off walls that couldn't be seen.

The pain was greater than anything; fire, explosions, and sharp things that glitter in the dark were nothing compared to this torment.

Nothing compared to having your skin from the thighs down stripped away, or the shadowy feeling of fingers moving up, digging sharp claws into the skin before they tear it off.

They didn't stop ripping.

He didn't stop screaming.

They finally worked up to his face as he howled, blood dripping off exposed muscles and fragments of bloody skin.

They removed the skin covering his eyes, tearing his eyes out in the process.

No human could have survived that.

Nothing living could have survived this, but, of course, he isn't human.

Doesn't understand the concept of human

Didn't understand anything except that it hurt and he missed the calming nothingness, the soothing void.

They finished flaying him, and some of them started to wrap around him, squeezing just tight enough to shape him into something more human.

A pair of eyes popped into his empty sockets and somehow connected, allowing him to see through a violet filter, although the only thing to see was the eye watching him.

Most of the hands drew back, as if silently asking for the eye's approval, but some of them stayed behind, weaving together on his pain-wracked frame, connecting with him, becoming a skin to replace the one they destroyed.

He looked down and saw that they were finished and the pain was receding, fading into a hazy memory only made real by the aching under the hands covering him.

He was no longer a mutilated corpse inhabited by a monster.

No, he's now more refined, and he has a purpose, a form, a body to call his own: that of a pitch-black daemon with violet eyes.

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Ten years ago…

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It was getting boring behind The Gateway.

Plenty of dead souls had come through, screaming and begging to be released from the fate they condemned themselves to, but no other fool alchemists had come searching for a dead loved one.

Disappointment shot through him as he remembered the tastes of previous tolls, fresh and tasty, raw meat dripping with blood only beginning clot.

No…

_He_ didn't remember it.

How could he when they hadn't taken a toll since the woman he hated, the woman who brought him back from the void?

But memory of human blood was woven into the hands that formed his skin.

Suddenly, a figure had appeared amid the river of dead souls pouring into the tunnel.

A figure with a body.

A screaming blonde-haired boy crying out for his brother, although his body was quickly disintegrating and his soul would be next.

The Eye silently told them that the brother, another alchemist, was on the way.

Now things were getting interesting, a toll would be taken soon, blood spilled, dreams shattered, and bodies ripped apart.

All when the brother arrived…

A child's voice, high-pitched and frantic, sounded outside the gate: the brother had arrived and was pleading with the Truth.

Soon…

Soon…

NOW!

Another boy, slightly older than the first, had come hurtling through the gate and into the tunnel, screaming and flailing limbs that he would not have for much longer.

The screaming had slowly quieted as the boy realized what he was seeing: not the Truth, but his mother, a shadowy silhouette just beyond his reach.

He smiled, but it soon twisted into a grimace of pain as the daemon took a hold of his leg and ripped it away.

He fell, screaming, back out of their realm and into his own, with nothing to show for it except a bloody stump.

They laughed silently, but before they could feast on their bloody trophy he was back.

They wondered if he wanted it back, but no, he wanted the other boy, his brother.

They would be happy to oblige.

For a price of course.

He grabbed an arm and grinned evilly at the poor boy before taking the cost of a half-decayed soul and tossing both him and his brother's soul back to where they came from.

The older brother had come back for the younger one…

What a fool.

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He was about to rip the arm in half to share with the hands, when a strange thought entered his head:

_You have an alchemist's arm and leg._

_You could have a real body._

_You could go back and be an alchemist_.

The idea was ridiculous, it must have come from the Eye, as the hands were urging him to eat the limbs, which he was going to of course, but the idea sounded so…

Tempting...

And then he was being pulled back, still clutching the arm and leg, back into the tunnel, not as one of the daemons who inhabited it, but as an alchemist who dared to tread into Hell.

He screamed, the first sound he'd made since the wretched woman left him here.

Knowledge flooded his brain, he understood.

If he could stop screaming, he could talk, as if he had been doing so his entire existence.

Eventually, the information slowed then stopped, and he staggered back in shock, still trying to comprehend what the Eye wanted, why it had showed him this.

But the hands answered him before he could ask, holding up something pale, dead looking, and covered in dried blood…

His skin.

Then the arm and leg disintegrated in his hands and he felt a twinge in one of his shadowy limbs.

He looked down to find that the alchemist's limbs had replaced his own.

A peach-coloured arm and leg on a pitch-black body.

A flesh-coloured light in the dark.

Then the hands pulled the skin over his shoulders, and the nerves all over his body connected and began to function.

Agony set in, and pain exploded throughout a body that had only been able to experience feeling for a few seconds, overloading the newly-functioning nerves and sending a message of pain and fire screaming into his brain.

He collapsed in the dark as they pulled the bloody hide over the hands covering him.

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He woke up to a blinding white light shining directly in his eyes.

His pupils contracted, and he hissed, unused to the light after living in the darkness inside the Gateway.

The Truth, the horrible white thing that controlled all of them, even The Eye, was standing above him.

A shadow of a mouth turned up in a chilling grin.

It spoke with two voices, one following the other seamlessly, male and female, human and daemon intertwined, blending into each other, sending shivers down his spine.

"I see they've given you your skin back, they did a good job, you look almost human…"

"Your eyes give you away though, too much of the daemon in them."

He looked down, both to verify what the Truth was telling him, and to get away from that horrible blank space where eyes should have been.

He didn't expect to find what he did: his skin was covering him seamlessly, except the alchemist's arms; they were their original colour, contrasting the almost pure white of his recycled hide.

He stood there, a pale, naked boy covered in blood both old and new, innocent looking except for the hatred in his eyes, which, as The Truth said, revealed the darkness that was not far beneath the surface.

They stood there for what could have been a moment or forever, two pale figures almost blending in with the blank background.

Then the Truth did something unexpected: it put a hand in the middle of his chest and pushed; toppling him to the ground; then it grabbed his right foot and pulled upward, forcing him onto his back.

Memories made bolts of fear shoot through the hands; little boys had died in this position before, but the Truth only traced a design on the ball of his foot before standing up.

As soon as it did that, fire erupted over the skin, then, just as quickly vanished, leaving a red, hateful mark on the flesh.

The Truth put its hand over his face, and he fell back, unconscious, before fading into nothing more that a drop of blood that had spilled from his wound on the otherwise blank ground.

"There, there."

"No need for you to remember…"

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Someone awoke in the middle of a large circle of flattened stones.

He didn't know if it was him or not, because he didn't know who he was.

An empty whiteness had replaced any memories he might have had.

Unless the empty whiteness was a memory…

No, just…

_Nothingness_ couldn't be a memory.

Could it?

The image of a single violet eye popped into his mind, then was gone so fast that he didn't know if he really saw it or not.

He shook it off and tried to stand up.

Bad idea.

His foot was literally on fire, flames adding an orange glow to the nothingness behind.

His eyes widened in pain and shock, then it was gone, it was all gone, back into the space at the back of his mind.

He fell, his hands somehow touched, and then landed on the stone floor.

He wanted the pain to go away; instead, another sharper pain cut a line through his chest before vanishing and taking the flames in his foot with it.

He looked down, and saw that his foot had been turned to stone.

Stones don't feel pain.

He tried to stand again, and found that he could.

He looked around that part of the island, (although he wasn't sure how he knew it was an island, he's not sure what else it could be.)

He found nothing that he remembered, but did he expect to find anything?

He didn't know, he didn't know anything right now, except that it was getting dark and he was tired and wanted something to lie down on.

He found a bed of rotting leaves, put his hands on the pile, and imagined the leaves growing, regaining their healthy green colour, and, of course, that's exactly what happened.

He climbed onto the pile and looked at his stone foot, imagining it the way it was before.

The stone dissolved into a crackling blue light, leaving his by-then slightly numb foot the same as it had been when he found himself in the stone circle.

He grasped his foot and pulled it up to his face, wincing at the slight twinge of pain.

There, on the ball of his foot, was a slightly raised mound of fresh scar tissue in the shape of a dragon chasing its tail around a star.

He wondered what it meant.

Was it something he should remember?

Was it a clue to who he was and what he was doing here?

He sighed, released the foot, and collapsed back onto the cushion-like leaves, feeling a sudden longing for something he's never had.

He didn't know what it is, but the tears that were suddenly running down his cheeks signified that it was something important, something he needed.

He cried himself to sleep, while, far away, his mother cried for her baby, and, even though it had been eight years exactly since he died, the childless mother and the motherless child both wept for each other, their sobs disappearing into the night.

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Now

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She bursts through the crumbling door, and into the remains of the house in the burned-out city beneath the ground.

She stops dead in her tracks as her baby, as Wrath, turns to face her, insanity burning in his chilling gaze.

A look of hatred that a child should never feel directed straight at her.

It's been eighteen years since her miscarriage, but he still appears to be only ten or eleven, a daemon who never ages and bears the face of her child.

He smiles, blood lust apparent in his eyes, then, without a word, he turns to a tank of Red Water behind him.

A small crack ran across the side of it, and the liquid that dripped out of it stayed just that, a liquid, not a stone, or any of the things that pure Red Water could do in its more refined forms.

Now, it's just an acid, a deadly, fast-acting acid that would leave nothing behind to remind him of the woman who claimed to be his mother, the woman who had killed his real mama- or at least who he thought was his mama.

He raises a hand and smashes the glass with one well-placed blow, at the same time stepping out of the way so as not to die himself.

The blood-like liquid spills out, drenching her legs up to the knees and starting to eat them away.

She cries out in pain and falls in.

He doesn't understand, she could save herself, she had seen the gate after all, the circle was inside her; she could create a platform, make the Red Water disappear, anything to live, to fight him…

So, why didn't she?

The he realizes, she wants to die, to be killed by the thing that she had brought to life.

Why?

She's almost dead now, a minute or so and she'll be gone, sent to the hellish gate that she had abandoned him at.

She reaches out a hand to him, "My…son…" she whispers.

His eyes clear, her suffering passed through the words to him, he finds that he doesn't…

Hate her, he doesn't…

Want her to die.

He doesn't know why, but he steps into the acid, collapses next to her, and holds her hand as their spirits go back to the Gate, ready to face Hell together.

Their clasped hands are the last things to dissolve.


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